RED STORM - World's fastest computer

The world's fastest supercomputer -- Sandia's Red Storm -- should be one-quarter assembled by the end of September and completely up and running by January, says Director Bill Camp (9200), who heads the effort to design and assemble the machine.

Asked precisely how fast the new supercomputer would go, Bill said: "Really fast."

Early prototypes are already running Sandia and Cray software to test functionality and performance.

The $90 million, innovatively designed machine is expected to commence performance at 41.5 teraflops and in a year reach 100 teraflops.

The upward speed projection is not pie-in-the-sky but mathematically predictable. Next June, each processor will be replaced with two processors, each running 25 percent faster.

"Do the math," Bill says.

DOE requires for its investment that the new machine run seven times as fast as ASCI Red. "We think Red Storm will run ten times as fast," says Bill.


The Machine

• The machine has 96 processors in each computer cabinet, with four processors to a board. Each processor can have up to eight gigabytes of memory sitting next to it. Four Cray SeaStars -- powerful networking chips -- sit on a daughter board atop each board. All SeaStars talk to each other, "like a Rubik's cube with lots of squares on each face," says Bill. "Cray SeaStars are about a factor of 10 faster than any current competing capability."
  
  
• Messages encoded in MPI (the Message Passage Interface standard) move from processor to processor at a sustained speed of five gigabytes per second bidirectionally. The amount of time to get the first information bit from one processor to another is less than five microseconds across the system. Four rows of machines, with approximately 11,600 Opteron processors and a similar number of SeaStars, will be the arrangement of the major components of the machine.
  
  
• The SeaStar chip includes an 800 MHz DDR Hypertransport interface to its Opteron processors, a PowerPC core for handling message-passing chores, and a six-port router. SeaStars are linked together to make up the system's 3-D
  
  
• (X-Y-Z axis) mesh interconnect.
  
  
• IBM will fabricate the SeaStar chips using 0.13-micron CMOS technology.
  
  
• Visualization will occur inside the computer itself -- a capability unique to Red Storm among supercomputers.
  
  

www.sandia.gov...

But can it run Doom 3 in Ultra settings?

Can I just ask what exactly this would be used for? Or is it just to show it can be done?

Sandia will probally use it for nuclear weapons research. Due to the test ban we signed, we can only use supercomputers to do the simulations. Also they are using it for 'stockpile stewardship' - i.e. maintaining our nuclear deterent.

=-Rich

100 Teraflops?!?!? *drools*

This is definately a great achievment. They could put it to good use at NASA or some other Organisation like that. But DAMN 100 Teraflops...i cant get past that.

Originally posted by Arek
But can it run Doom 3 in Ultra settings?

lmao - my question exactly!! How would Unreal 04 run on it?!?!

What's the size of this thing?? When can I buy one

It says the visuals are going to be in the computer....so I wonder how it's contained??

ITs comforting a machine called "Red Storm" will be processing our nuclear secrets

What is a teraflop and what do you mean by "Visualization will occur inside the computer itself -- a capability unique to Red Storm among supercomputers. "

thanks

Originally posted by Quicksilver
ITs comforting a machine called "Red Storm" will be processing our nuclear secrets

What is a teraflop and what do you mean by "Visualization will occur inside the computer itself -- a capability unique to Red Storm among supercomputers. "

thanks

A teraflop is a trillion FPO's (Floating Point Operations) per second. As for the visualization occuring inside the comp itself...maybe they mean the CPUs process the information and trasmit it out...instead of a GPU. Im reasearching for it now.

Originally posted by EnronOutrunHomerun

Originally posted by Arek
But can it run Doom 3 in Ultra settings?

When can I buy one

Yes, for about 90 million.

ok correct me if I'm wrong but if this thing has 96 processors and can ony do 41.5 teraflops then when the cell processor comes out late this year early next year it should blow the pants off of red storm,1 cell processor is supposed to do 2 teraflops,so it would only take 21 of them to overtake red storm.


The cell processor is being used for the next playstation 3,...can't wait!

Originally posted by thecry
ok correct me if I'm wrong but if this thing has 96 processors and can ony do 41.5 teraflops then when the cell processor comes out late this year early next year it should blow the pants off of red storm,1 cell processor is supposed to do 2 teraflops,so it would only take 21 of them to overtake red storm.


The cell processor is being used for the next playstation 3,...can't wait!

Do you have a link to these ' cell processors ' ? I find it highly unlikely that the Playstation has teroflop processors. How much will a PS3 cost - $10million ?

At its primary stage it'll only just top the 2002 built Earth Simulator of Japan thats rated at 35/41TFlops.

I hope they manage to push the machine up to 100Tflops before Blue Gene goes online, because that one will push between 105 and 110 Tflops and IBM can easely make an extra cabinet to add another 15 Tflops to it.

Will Red Storm be the first to reach 100Tflops and claim the top spot temporarely? Or will IBM beat them to the top spot and stay at it?

Only the future can tell.

www.gamespot.com...

"While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver 1 trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."

Originally posted by thecry
www.gamespot.com...

"While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver 1 trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."

Thanks for the information, very intersting. Could these 'cell' chips spell theend for Intel and the Pentium ?

Thanks for the information, very intersting. Could these 'cell' chips spell theend for Intel and the Pentium ?

I hear IBM is moving beyond servers and are going to start selling their processors to the public like Intel and AMD,this could be major trouble for them.

That is one fast computer but it still pales in comparsion with the human brain Your brain is made up of about one trillion cells with 100 trillion connections between those cells.a rough estimate it is handling 10 quadrillion instructions per second, but it really is hard to say.

So that would be 10 quadraflops if thats even a word

But computers like this are getting faster all the time its not going to be very long before computers surpass the human brain perhaps around 2030.

haha yea i wonder if it can play doom 3 in ultra, im begining to think its impossible...just something to make the game seem flashier.

What is the use of a huge-super computer running 100s of these terra flop things? what do you do with them? Just for the world record?

The operators of these supercomputers will use all that processing power to run highly complex simulations like weather patterns, climate predictions and, as rvfried stated in this case, nuclear explosions and effects.

[edit on 26-8-2004 by Spectre]

Originally posted by Spectre
The operators of these supercomputers will use all that processing power to run highly complex simulations like weather patterns, climate predictions and, as rvfried in this case, nuclear explosions and effects.

Also stealth work, high-energy physics, chemical reactions (ie.HE) etc. These scientists can never have too much computing power, that's why these machines are constantly getting faster. Of course it costs millions of dollars to write the software that runs on these masssively parallelled computers.

Doh! Absolutely, right on all counts, MS. How could I forget stealth calculations especially? The ability to crunch the complex equations to predict RCS was one of the limiting factors in stealth design and development. There will always be a waiting line for supercomputer time.